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The Conjuring universe has gotten pretty big pretty quickly, but all it takes is one substandard spin-off to make you realize just how much craft and care are needed to make these things work right. The Curse of La Llorona (safe bet the most mispronounced title of the year) has a connection to the priest from the first Annabelle movie, and it features a supernatural spirit, a ghostly woman in a wedding dress hunting for children to replace the ones that she murdered in spite centuries ago. The main problem with Llorona is that it is so repetitive. The ghost story winds up being over an hour of the same jump scares over and over, the same high-pitched shrieks, the same door slams, the same overzealous film score, again and again. The movie occasionally introduces a unique plot mechanic like the spirit not being able to cross a makeshift barrier as long as it stays unbroken. One minute later: one of the dumb kids breaks it to reach for her dumb doll. Why even introduce a plot mechanic that involves limitations for your supernatural villain to simply cast it aside literally minutes later? If a horror movie is not going to go to the trouble of developing characters I care about, it better produce clever and effective suspense set pieces to generate that missing entertainment. This movie is cursed by not doing either, and so it becomes a redundant series of the same lame scares. There really isn’t a reason for The Curse of La Llorona to exist other than one more chance to remind me just how much better James Wan is when it comes to horror scene construction. Skip this one, folks.